I was asked to print this pair of maps, which come from Patrick Whitefield's book 'The Living Landscape,' and to put them on everyone's seats before the 'Aluna' film showing. We need to think about our local rivers. The contrast between the two images seems very graphic: the natural course of the flowing river as it once was, and the distorted, disjointed, angular waterway that it has become. Some kind of healing is required, but exactly what is beyond my understanding.

All the same a project, a course of action, has gradually been forming in my mind. It has arisen from three things coming together over the past winter: the floods on the levels, the Kogis' message to look after the rivers (and focussing on our local rivers seems all the more pertinent after seeing the film), and Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee's four point plan. The four points have given a shape to what I want to do in relation to the river. I shall do my best to explain how this might play itself out as I come to understand it better. Here I just want to explain briefly what the four points are.

Llewellyn is my Sufi meditation group's spiritual teacher. His focus on what he terms 'spiritual ecology' is a refreshing approach from a spiritual teacher. He has written several books on the terrible state that the world is in, and how that is a reflection of the terrible state of our inner world. Until very recently however he has met the question of 'what shall we do about it?' with his belief that it is not for him to tell people what to do; but people kept asking, and then in a moment of inspiration he came up with his 'four point plan': witnessing, grieving, payer, and action.

"Witnessing--an awareness of what is happening in the inner and outer worlds. It means a state of awareness that sees without judgment, without expectation, without wanting anything, and in particular without wanting anything to change."

"Grief –This is our Earth, which has given us so much, and this is where our children and our grandchildren will grow up—and what we are doing is almost unspeakable. It is a betrayal of life itself. And we need to feel this, to grieve and to love."

"From this grief comes the third stage, Prayer. Prayer is the soul’s most basic response. It is our cry to God, to our Beloved, in times of distress. And my sense is that this primal cry from the soul is also the Earth’s prayer—the Earth is crying to God through us—our prayer is the voice, the calling of the Earth."

"Action is the fourth stage. We live in a world that needs us to act ... The problem with most action at this time is that it comes from the same mind-set that created the problem, the same conditioning and values that are destroying our world. This is why first we need to pray, so that we are aligned with a different set of values, a consciousness that is not conditioned."

A hundred of us squeezed into La Terre restaurant on Glastonbury High Street to watch the new film from the Kogis. The first film, more than twenty years ago now, was 'The Mamas Warning.' The warning was that if we continue to treat the environment the way that we as a species have been treating it, the world will not last. The warning was not heeded, and the Kogis called director Alan Ereira back to make a new film.

The Kogis have chosen to emerge from their safe but hidden home in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta - near the Caribbean coast of Colombia - in order to deliver their message. They have learnt to understand film technology, and this film has considerable input from them - it is not simply a film about them. Also, it is not just an emotional appeal to 'Little Brother' to wake up; it is an approach to the modern scientific mind. And it is magical, and seems to work on both levels.

For several days after watching 'Aluna' part of me was still was still in the world of the Kogis, living at their pace, walking with their gait, doing my best to see the world with their eyes and their understanding. "You do not have to abandon your lives" they said to us, "but you must look after the rivers."

Since hearing this brief but central part of their message before, I have been taking notice of our local rivers near Glastonbury: the Brue and the Axe, which were severed from each other in the Middle Ages when the Brue was redirected and turned into a canal. I have been walking across the levels and tracing where the missing part of the river used to flow. Now I feel inspired to go to the mouth of the river Axe, and to find there something to take as an offering, to the source of the river Brue.

This is Alan Ereira's summary of the film:

The Kogi once traded with Maya and Aztecs. Their civilization still survives hidden on Colombia's highest mountain. They believe they are guardians of the world. Their leaders are trained from infancy in darkness to work by connecting with 'aluna', a cosmic consciousness. They perceive 'black lines' that connect special sites essential to life. In 1990, convinced that we were destroying the earth, they sent a warning through a British film-maker and then withdrew. They have now concluded that we cannot have grasped the warning and they have to explain it better if the world is to survive. So they recalled the film-maker and instructed him to film their demonstration of these connections, using 400km of gold thread. So begins a truly bizarre journey. We see people who have no wheel or writing, who know nothing of our world, seriously discussing dark energy with a leading astronomer and correctly identifying objects seen by the Hubble telescope. But as the journey gets under way they gradually realize that the film-maker has no idea what they are trying to demonstrate and their own arguments are treated as fantasy by a local biologist. So they change tack, taking us up into their mountain to show exactly what they mean, and then coming down to join forces with leading scientists who recognize that this is important cutting-edge knowledge dealing with a very grave issue. Their journey leads to apocalyptic horror, but in an astonishing resolution ends with an extraordinary joyful celebration of new life.http://www.alunathemovie.com/en/